{"id":199,"date":"2026-08-11T03:31:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T03:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/?p=199"},"modified":"2026-08-11T03:31:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T03:31:24","slug":"why-we-choose-to-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markusstettler.com\/?p=199","title":{"rendered":"Why We Choose to Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Czech writer and statesman V\u00e1clav Havel tells the story of a superior he once had in his essay &#8220;The Power of the Powerless.&#8221; Brewmaster \u0160 was passionate about his job \u2014 he wanted to brew good beer, and worked hard to find ways to improve a brewery that wasn&#8217;t doing well. He spent most of his time at work. And he continually pushed his fellow employees in the state-owned company simply because he assumed that all of them were as passionate about making good beer as he was. Which, as Havel admits, they were not \u2014 not in the atmosphere of 1970s socialism-induced indifference to work. \u0160 often suggested his improvement ideas to the manager of the brewery. But this man had no passion for the art of beer brewing. He did not know the feeling of bliss when creating something truly remarkable. So the manager always dismissed \u0160, and grew increasingly hostile toward him. He started to fight \u0160&#8217;s efforts. \u0160 saw no other way than to write to his manager&#8217;s superior. He tried to explain why the brewery was doing so badly. His improvements would have helped everybody. The customer would have enjoyed the beer more, the manager would have been seen as more successful, and the employees, including \u0160, would have been more motivated. Yet nothing changed. The manager was better connected in the system. \u0160&#8217;s letter was seen as an attack on the brewery, the management, and the system. He was called a saboteur for telling the truth. So eventually he was sent to another brewery and demoted, labeled a dissident. The beer stayed bad. And everybody \u2014 at least the people working there \u2014 knew why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The Board Room Version: Organizational failure is not a knowledge problem. There are people who see it. Something else stops us from acting. Failure isn\u2019t caused by bad individuals at the top. It\u2019s facilitated by systems that make going along easy and resisting feel hard &#8211; regardless of how obviously right the alternative is. Havel shows how ideology and policy become rituals to be performed. The meaning behind it becomes irrelevant, displaying compliance makes it feel compulsory for everyone else. So everybody becomes oppressor and oppressed at the same time. When everyone participates and everyone is shaped by the system, it seems like nobody is to blame. This is a trap, not a conclusion. Thompson rejects both blaming only the top and blaming the system. Responsibility should be traced person by person: what did they do, what did they know, did they have real alternatives. Jung explains that inside large groups people start treating themselves and others as interchangeable roles rather than individuals. A group of people who&#8217;ve stopped reasoning as individuals has zero collective moral capacity \u2014 a &#8220;million zeros.&#8221; The only way an organization has any moral reasoning at all is if individuals inside it keep doing it themselves. Arendt shows how people stay individuals: by continuing to speak and disagree genuinely, not just signaling agreement. This only works among people who are different enough to have something to say, and equal enough to understand each other \u2014 what she calls plurality. In her study of Eichmann, she shows what happens when this stops entirely: a man who could only speak in stock phrases, and therefore could no longer think from another person&#8217;s standpoint at all. Not a monster \u2014 someone who had simply stopped reasoning. Organizations don&#8217;t have consciences. People do. No system, however much pressure it applies, removes individual responsibility. It&#8217;s still a choice \u2014 to participate and reason together, or to fail.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When we see organizations fail, it is not a knowledge problem. There are always enough people in an organization who know it. We have seen that the right course is often logical or backed by evidence or even plain obvious. And sometimes it is just the right thing to do based on moral reasoning. Yet going against the established order feels like hitting a wall, or somehow illegal, or dangerous. So the question isn&#8217;t why people don&#8217;t know better. It&#8217;s why, knowing better, they still fail to act \u2014 and why the system makes that failure seem unremarkable, even necessary. And why does trying to do the right thing, trying to prevent failure, become the wrong way to act in an organization?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You may say that Havel&#8217;s example was life in a communist dictatorship, and that this was just a repressive political environment, fundamentally unlike an ordinary company. What if that is the wrong perception altogether? What if it is not about dictatorship at all, but something more structural that can be found in other places, too? Havel analyzes this quite well and comes to a better description of what the system he fought against actually was. He calls it post-totalitarian automatism. Any dictatorship starts the same way: one person or group at the top gives orders, enforced by violence or fear. But this is just the beginning. With time, people learn what is expected of them. We heard of that idea before, when Foucault explained how controls get internalized over time \u2014 same basic principle. How this works in dictatorships is ideology. Ideology gives people behaviors or rituals they are told to perform that ensure they can show their compliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is Havel&#8217;s famous example of the greengrocer who \u2014 as he is told \u2014 always puts a sign in his shop window: &#8220;Workers of the world, unite!&#8221; Very important: the greengrocer is no hardcore socialist. He doesn&#8217;t believe the words on the sign, but they are not important anyway. What is important is that he displays it. This act says: I know the rules. I will behave. Leave me in peace. And of course he is not alone doing this. Everybody does it. The kiosk lady, the policeman, the brewery manager. All put up the signs. They create a panorama of compliance. And devilishly, that creates a system where compliance is compulsory. So by the act of public compliance, everybody is at the same time acting compliant and enforcing compliance. And that automatism replaces the traditional idea of dictatorship. The system does not require leaders to believe the ideology \u2014 only that everyone performs it. The performance is self-sustaining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is very important when determining who acts in a system and who bears responsibility. Systems always need agents to form and operate them. There is no system without agents \u2014 and yes, if you want to be really exact, a system can still produce output for a while on inertia, but it cannot be formed, changed, or sustained without agents. In post-totalitarian automatism, we have seen that everybody becomes both object and subject, both oppressor and oppressed \u2014 they are all the agents needed to run the system. Now, that would mean that nobody is actually responsible anymore, because everybody is both victim and perpetrator. That, and the fact that this is an automatism, makes the system look like a metaphysical order \u2014 power that appears as fact or necessity. Nobody has a choice, nobody is responsible. Does this remind you of something? I certainly think of Shareholder Primacy \u2014 the way it is accepted until today as a fact \u2014 the market has decided. Roger Martin&#8217;s Fixing the Game shows exactly this: the way it is used as an excuse for any kind of business decision. And we already established, due to missing empirical proof and inner logic, that it is not a valid business strategy but an ideology. But total irresponsibility is a trap, and we will see later why \u2014 first we continue with Havel, because there is more. The system cannot correct itself through the same rituals that reproduce it. Correction requires contestability: someone able to challenge its language, evidence, and assumptions from a position not governed by the demand to confirm them. And self-assessment most of the time fails because it tends to confirm the system&#8217;s own view. We have all seen this in practical applications in businesses, where teams or individuals are sometimes asked to do exactly that. Self-assessment works best among those already capable of doubt \u2014 and worst exactly where doubt is most urgently needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When somebody actually does act up in this system of automatism, like the brewmaster, reactions are usually quite harsh. He doesn&#8217;t just get a warning. He gets fired \u2014 at least the communist regime equivalent of it. He loses friends and social standing. So not an individual punishment, and not by just one person. It is \u2014 as we have seen above \u2014 multiple people, the system, lashing out at him. A bit much for just proposing a couple of improvements and blaming management, don&#8217;t you think? The thing is, his act was not just this individual offense \u2014 the same way the sign of the greengrocer is not just a sign. He was in fact exposing the failure of the whole system itself, not just the process of making beer. That is why the whole system reacts. Now, his act was a real thing. It is something everybody can do, and it means living within the truth. Ordinary, achievable, normal, if viewed as just the action itself. But as we have seen, the significance is more than that \u2014 and so are the consequences. On top of that, it does not mean that the system changes, or that you get anything out of it if you speak or act up. More likely, you would suffer the same as Havel&#8217;s brewmaster. He lived within the truth, but there was no gain. Do right and suffer the consequence. Shit, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, let&#8217;s get back to our other riddle of thought: total irresponsibility. Havel leaves us hanging there, and we have to find the solution elsewhere. Dennis Thompson, an American philosopher, dissected the problem of moral responsibility when decisions appear to be made by systems or organizations rather than by individuals, in his famous article &#8220;The Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands.&#8221; And yes Thompson wrote about public officials but the structural conditions are the same as in companies, so it applies just as well. The question is still: if everyone is complicit, is anybody actually responsible? His one-second answer would probably be &#8220;No&#8221; \u2014 but let&#8217;s give him some more seconds to give us a better answer. He rejects both obvious possibilities: hierarchical responsibility \u2014 blame the top \u2014 or collective responsibility \u2014 blame everybody together as a group, so basically the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The hierarchical model has several problems. Leaders are not the only people taking actions in organizations. Lower-level people make choices too, even when faced with an order from the top. There is also the problem that everybody below the top would get an automatic carte blanche: &#8220;I was just doing my job.&#8221; And it would mean that leadership responsibility turns into a ritualistic sacrifice \u2014 the leader essentially becomes a paid scapegoat. Which is bad, because the result would be that only the top person is replaced in a failure case, while all the other people, and the system itself, remain untouched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The collective model is not doing any better. The main problem is that a collective or a group, a system or an organization, does not know, choose, and act the way only a person can. Members contribute very differently. One person might design a policy, another approves it, somebody acts on it, another objects, and some were not involved at all. Calling all equally responsible does not reflect reality and is unfair. Plus, the moment we talk about groups or organizations, we take away responsibility from the individuals who then don&#8217;t have to answer for their decisions or actions. And a distinction between the ones who made the choices and the ones who might have resisted or were not involved becomes impossible in collective responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thompson&#8217;s answer is something like a well-investigated personal responsibility \u2014 or rather, responsibilities. Because you have to trace decisions through the organization and identify what each individual actually did. Based on this, you can assign responsibility in different degrees. Not simple or sexy, but a real solution to the problem. Actually, what you would have to do is come up with some questions that would have to be answered for each person individually. What did this person do in that case? Did their actions or omissions contribute to the harmful outcome? What did they know, or what should they reasonably have known? Did they act freely, or were they under constraint? And could they reasonably have acted differently \u2014 objected, warned, refused, resigned? Eventually you do not get an answer of yes or no, but responsibility in degrees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thompson tells us how to assign responsibility after organizational failure. But he does not yet explain why individuals so often surrender the judgement for which they remain responsible. For that, we need psychology and this time to one of the pioneers of modern analytical psychology: C.G. Jung. OK, some remember him for some of his stranger ideas \u2014 archetypes like the shadow and the wise old man, and his interest in paranormal experiences. But he was a truly great interpreter of the psyche. And his essay &#8220;Gegenwart und Zukunft&#8221; is a great analysis of why the individual stops reasoning in a system. When we talk about the individual, we need a different perspective than usual \u2014 because normally, we talk scientifically: we look for averages, general rules, recurring patterns. The problem with that, according to Jung, is that this is actually what the individual is not. The individual is not the abstraction. It is, in a sense, the statistical exception \u2014 but all of us are the exception. Strange? Let me give you a simple example: the average man is 178 cm tall. The individual called Markus is 197 cm tall. The average height describes a population \u2014 it simply cannot tell us how tall Markus is. So if we want to look at the individual, we have to look at the exception as well as the theory \u2014 please be aware that it is Jung calling it theory, not me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Just a small correction to Jung when he speaks of theory and statistics and averages as the subject of science, and a reason behind this mass formation. Theory, as I understand it, is a means to explain reality, not an abstraction. Statistical analysis is more than just an average. Deming pointed out that the most important figures in statistics are actually the differences from the average: the variations. I think what Jung saw was more an abstraction in the sense of a simplification of the social being. Theory is not bad \u2014 it gives you orientation. But real knowledge about the individual, which he also calls self-knowledge, can only come from experiencing the individual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This perspective is important because when people enter into a large organization \u2014 or mass movement, as he calls it \u2014 they lose that perspective, that way of thinking of people as distinct individuals, including of themselves. They become interchangeable members of groups \u2014 like employees, or consumers, or voters. You might say, &#8220;Yeah, well, that is the case. We are those things.&#8221; The problem is connected to something we have already seen. If joining a group also means giving up your individual choices or your own moral reasoning, the group cannot take that over, because as a group it does not have this ability. This means that in this mass formation, you end up with what Jung calls a million zeros \u2014 a group made of morally passive parts. We all know that a million zeros still adds up to zero. So no matter how many people you have, it&#8217;s a moral vacuum \u2014 something bad actors then often misuse. The only possibility for a group or organization to still have moral reasoning is for the individuals to continue to do that on their own. The other case, when a leader takes over the apparent thinking, is often doomed. This is called ego-inflation. The mass projects its needs onto the leader. That in turn enlarges him into a superhuman figure. The leader internalizes this projection and becomes exactly that \u2014 a projected greatness, not true greatness \u2014 and he becomes a captive of it. Imagine the crowd creates a god, and the god-leader becomes imprisoned by the role of being a god.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Is this god-leader the only thing that can replace individual morality? No. What happens far more commonly is that a policy of the organization replaces it, according to Jung. Remember something: what did Havel say is used to control the masses? Ideology, right. A policy becomes ideological when it stops guiding judgement and instead replaces it \u2014 when &#8216;the policy says so&#8217; is treated as the end of moral reasoning. Ideology tells the citizen what must be true; dysfunctional policy tells the employee what no longer needs to be thought about. I see no difference whether it is a state, a social group, or a company. The principles are always the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What, then, according to Jung, is the contrasting movement to mass formation, since it is a rather strong force? That would be organized individuality. But please be aware, this does not mean the individual has to act all alone \u2014 it means the individual needs to be inwardly organized. Know yourself, understand your fears and weaknesses, be stable, and act consistently rather than react.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jung explains how individuality is lost. But what is lost with it \u2014 and what must individuals do together if they are to recover it? Our last author for today might be able to answer this. Hannah Arendt is one of the most important political philosophers of the last century. She wrote a lot about totalitarian regimes and how they work, but in her most foundational work, &#8220;The Human Condition,&#8221; she analyzed how human beings act within society. And she found three different ways: labour, work, and action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Labour is what we do to keep life going. It is there to satisfy our biological needs \u2014 things like growing food and preparing it, cleaning and caring for ourselves, even earning what is needed to survive. The basics, so to speak. Labour must be repeated endlessly, because whatever it produces is quickly consumed \u2014 in this, it&#8217;s no different from what any animal does. Every creature must continually maintain life. Most importantly, this constant repetition happens because the result is consumed and the need is permanent. In a company, for example, that would be permanent production steps or answering customer requests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Work creates the lasting things \u2014 it creates the human-made world. Building a house, writing a book, designing a machine, constructing a legal framework. Work therefore has a beginning and an end, and it leaves behind something relatively permanent. In a corporate environment, this is things like designing a new product or developing software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The last activity is action. According to Arendt, this happens when people speak and act together, but as distinct individuals. It does not necessarily produce an object. This is the way people begin something new, shape the political world, and reveal who they are as individuals \u2014 for example, when you speak publicly, resist injustice, make a promise, or deliberate publicly with others about a shared course of action. In a company, that is the discussion of a challenging problem or the making of a strategy. All of this involves the sharing of individuals&#8217; ideas and thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Arendt&#8217;s categories were shaped by the ancient distinction between the private household, the world of fabrication and the public political realm. In the Greek polis, these activities were distributed very unequally among social groups \u2014 slaves labored, craftsmen worked, citizens acted. But labour, work, and action are not simply three modern occupational classes. They are different modes of activity, and a single working day can contain all three. Han van Diest and Ben Dankbaar have used exactly this feature to apply Arendt&#8217;s distinctions within organizations \u2014 everybody does a certain amount of labour and work and action, in different degrees, and that is closer to our reality. Even in the city-states, the political elite did some basic labour, like washing themselves and preparing food. Nobody is entirely free of repetitive tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I take from this is that a balance of all three is most important \u2014 and, since this is the biggest risk, that action is not neglected. Action is not simply an employee or a group finding the best way to achieve a given goal or number. Remember, action is reasoning and the sharing of ideas. So it is not like a project to become a leaner company. That would be simple addition, and we have seen in various examples that this is often systematically impossible to achieve. Arendt means action in the sense of deliberation. So it is discussing the question of what &#8220;leaner&#8221; means, for whom, what the trade-offs are, and whether this is the future we want to go toward collectively. Again, for Arendt, this is the exclusive form that is worthy. But many authors have applied these three forms of activity \u2014 labour, work, and action \u2014 as coexisting forms, especially when it comes to their use in management theory. In an Arendt-inspired organizational reading, action can be redeeming labour from mere necessity and work from purely instrumental reasoning. Action does not abolish labour or work \u2014 it brings their purposes back into a space where people can judge them together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Activity should not be reduced to fabrication \u2014 a controlled process for producing a predetermined result. Fabrication begins with an end, selects the necessary means, and treats material according to the plan. Applied to human beings, this turns people into instruments. And we have seen with Kant that this is not acceptable, however normal it may appear to us nowadays. For Arendt, plurality is displaced by the attempt to fabricate predictable human behavior \u2014 sorry, we&#8217;ll get to plurality in a moment. Havel describes the same structure from another side: personal judgment is replaced by ritual performance until the system reproduces itself automatically. Jung describes its psychological condition: individuality dissolves into mass identity. These are not competing explanations. They are connected stages of one mechanism. The person ceases to be an origin of judgment and becomes a functioning part of one big machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You may counter that this is exaggerated, since this applies only to work \u2014 just the eight or nine hours I&#8217;m in the office or the factory \u2014 and that this is the compromise you have to accept in modern life: you give up some freedom, let management make the decisions, and in return you get wages, security, and a life outside work. The first problem with this: the so-called Great Compromise has long since collapsed. It was an idea from industrialization, when the common view was that work and private life could be cleanly separated \u2014 sort of like, at work I am a wheel in a machine, and in my private life I am the really human being. But in today&#8217;s organizations, the demand for what workers have to invest of themselves into work has greatly expanded. Knowledge workers are asked to be creative and insightful, tapping into areas that are part of their personality. Service workers have to connect with customers. Workers have to motivate themselves. This collapse is of course most visible where the demand on the self has expanded furthest, but the trend exists everywhere. In addition, we have seen when we looked at the history of work that there was never a separation between work and the self. The idea was a myth from the beginning. Work was always directly connected to who we are \u2014 not just because eight hours are half of our waking hours, but also because activity, what we do, defines us. Last, I have to add that although I apply Arendt, Jung, and Havel to work and companies, this does not mean it would be limited to the eight hours you are in the office. You are part of a system also when you buy things, or eat, or do pretty much anything \u2014 even when you sleep. Havel had political systems in mind, Jung was referring to the psyche in modern society, and for Arendt it was the complete human condition. The different aspects of human life cannot be cleanly separated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, according to Arendt, action, as mentioned before, needs plurality. Action, in her sense, only exists among different people who can interact with one another. Through speech and acts, you and I reveal our distinct points of view and help shape a shared reality. Discussion is important because nobody owns the final outcome. Our agreements and disagreements, our interpretations, and truly new things that might come of our exchange \u2014 together, they form what is. For this exchange to happen, we need two things: equality and distinction. Huh? Sounds odd, but it&#8217;s true. We have to be equal enough to be able to speak together \u2014 equal enough that we understand each other&#8217;s reasoning. Not agree, just understand. At the same time, we have to be different enough to actually have different experiences, opinions, and views, so that we have something to say to each other. If everybody were exactly the same, there would be no need to talk. This enables us not just to define or be ourselves, but also to form a shared or collective reality. So for Arendt, mass formation, as Jung sees it, is not a final state \u2014 it can be overcome, but only if self-disclosure through speech continues. So this active state of plurality is key for action to be the way out of the instrumentalisation of the human being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Arendt wrote another book that is important for this mechanism in society. And it is about what happens when it fails in the worst way possible. &#8220;Eichmann in Jerusalem&#8221; is Arendt&#8217;s observation of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Eichmann was one of the principal organizers of the deportation of European Jews to ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination centers. It is also a book about the terminal case \u2014 what happens when a person has been reduced entirely to a formula, with no action or plurality left. Let me be clear: Arendt never doubted the guilt of Eichmann, or that he was fully responsible for his terrible crimes. What Arendt observed during the trial, and what she contested, was the way Eichmann was portrayed as a monstrous individual. She understands why this happens \u2014 it is very easy to blame a monster, a twisted, abnormal individual, when trying to understand why anybody could do such horrible things. She challenged the comforting expectation that deeds of monstrous evil must be committed by a visibly monstrous personality. But what Arendt found when she watched the trial and read the interrogation transcripts was a man filled with clich\u00e9s, who could not speak outside empty, ready-made formulas, and who was unable to think from another&#8217;s standpoint. That&#8217;s revealing: his stock phrases \u2014 duty, obedience, orders, official necessity \u2014 weren&#8217;t covering deeper thought. There was no deeper thought. He used ready-made formulas to interpret reality and to make moral judgments alike, because no real reasoning was happening at all. And the moment a person loses the ability to view another person&#8217;s standpoint, it results in an insulation from reality \u2014 his own and others&#8217;, at the same time. This makes it possible to follow orders that result in evil crimes as if they were harmless bureaucratic acts. This makes committing evil acts become normal, or banal. So it does not need a monster to commit them. It just needs an individual, or many individuals, who fail \u2014 or refuse \u2014 to exercise their capacity for judgment. The fact that this still is a choice makes each one fully responsible. And remember: the system cannot be blamed, because systems and organizations do not have morals or conscience. Only people have this ability. Whether Arendt underestimated Eichmann&#8217;s ideological conviction remains disputed \u2014 later historians have argued he was a more committed antisemite than her portrait suggests. What matters for her argument is that ideological commitment and bureaucratic thoughtlessness can coexist. Eichmann was the extreme example of something happening all the time, when people choose not to use their ability to be human.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The negation of our specifically human capacities begins when we allow ourselves to be absorbed into the mass, the organization, the system, the totalitarian regime. It happens when personal judgment is replaced by ideology, when we let ourselves become an abstraction, void of the exceptional traits that make us individuals, and by stopping speaking to and understanding each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is no easy recipe to avoid this. Nor is it a simple path to take. Nor is there a guarantee of success. But what is certain is that giving up what makes us human will lead to the failure of the system we live in, and to the failure of ourselves. But most importantly, with all systemic pressure, the individual responsibility remains. It cannot be constructed away. It is still for us to make a choice. We can either participate, discuss, resist, share, create, and work together. Or we can choose to fail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Don&#8217;t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Havel, V\u00e1clav. The Power of the Powerless. London: Vintage Classics, 2018 (essay originally written 1978).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thompson, Dennis F. &#8220;The Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands.&#8221; American Political Science Review 74, no. 4 (December 1980): 905\u2013916.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jung, C. G. The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Originally published as Gegenwart und Zukunft (Zurich: Rascher, 1957).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 (originally published 1958).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">van Diest, Han, and Ben Dankbaar. &#8220;Managing Freely Acting People: Hannah Arendt&#8217;s Theory of Action and Modern Management and Organisation Theory.&#8221; Radboud University repository.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Martin, Roger L. Fixing the Game: How Runaway Expectations Broke the Economy, and How to Get Back to Reality. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Czech writer and statesman V\u00e1clav Havel tells the story of a superior he once had in his essay &#8220;The Power of the Powerless.&#8221; Brewmaster \u0160 was passionate about his job \u2014 he wanted to brew good beer, and worked hard to find ways to improve a brewery that wasn&#8217;t doing well. 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